For Whom the Bell Tolls

His passionately committed, flawed masterpiece * Observer *
A sparse, masculine, world-weary meditation on death, ideology and the savagery of war in general, and the Spanish civil war in particular * Sunday Telegraph *
For Whom the Bell Tolls allowed us to actually see the experience of an irregular struggle, from the political and military point of view…That book became a familiar part of my life. And we always went back to it, consulted it, to find inspiration * Observer *
I read as a kid, of course, but it didn’t get me like that till I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I was very taken with that book. I still reread sections, though I’m now reading it not for the thrill of the story but for the technique and craft of it. * Daily Mail *
The best book Hemingway has written * New York Times *
The best fictional report on the Spanish Civil War that we possess – Anthony Burgess

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his crat. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.